"Man in case of 3 Ohio women held captive faces 329 charges including murder, rape, kidnapping"

The title of this post is the headline of this AP report on the indictments coming from a local grand jury on Friday which charge Ariel Castro with hundreds of crimes for spending a decade torturing three young women in his Cleveland home.  Here are the details:

A man accused of holding three women captive for about a decade in his Cleveland home — sometimes restraining them in chains — has been indicted by a grand jury on 329 charges, including aggravated murder, rape and kidnapping, prosecutors said.

Ariel Castro, 52, is accused of kidnapping Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight and holding keeping them inside his the run-down home, along with a 6-year-old girl he fathered with Berry. A Cuyahoga County grand jury returned the indictment Friday against Castro, a former school bus driver fired last fall.

He faces two counts of aggravated murder related to one act, saying he purposely caused the unlawful termination of one of the women’s pregnancies. Castro also was indicted on 139 counts of rape, 177 counts of kidnapping, seven counts of gross sexual imposition, three counts of felonious assault and one count of possession of criminal tools.

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty said the indictment covers only the period from August 2002, when the first of the women disappeared, to February 2007.

The indictment refers to the women as Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 3 and gives a glimpse into the circumstances of their captivity. The aggravated murder counts stem from the unlawful termination of Jane Doe 1’s pregnancy in late 2006 or early 2007, the indictment says.

It says Castro restrained the women, sometimes chaining them to a pole in a basement, to a bedroom heater or inside a van. It says one of the women tried to escape and he assaulted her with a vacuum cord around her neck.

Castro’s attorneys have said he would plead not guilty to any indictment. Castro, during a brief court appearance last month, tried to hide his face, tucking his chin inside his shirt collar, and did not speak. Castro is being held on $8 million bail. He has been taken off suicide prevention watch, jail officials said this week. He has told jail guards he won’t accept news media interview requests....

The women had gone missing separately between 2002 and 2004, when they were 14, 16 and 20 years old. They haven’t spoken publicly since their rescue....

Castro will be arraigned on the charges next week, and a trial judge will then be assigned.

The investigation continues, said McGinty, the prosecutor. When the indictment process is completed, the county prosecutor’s capital review committee will weigh whether the case is appropriate for seeking the death penalty. Days after the women were rescued from Castro’s home, McGinty had said at a news conference that capital punishment “must be reserved for those crimes that are truly the worst examples of human conduct.”...

Attorneys for the three women said Friday they were letting the judicial process unfold in the case. “We have a great legal system plus confidence and faith in the prosecutor’s office and its decisions,” they said in an emailed statement.

Recent related posts:

• Could and should the death penalty be on the table in the Cleveland kidnapping and sexual torture case?
• Cleveland police report supports Aggavated Murder capital charges against Ariel Castro
• "Why Might the Cleveland Kidnapper Get Charged With Murder?"
• Effective discussion of death penalty prospects for Cleveland kidnapper (and alleged pregnancy terminator) Ariel Castro